t will succeed. As long as the
business world was itself fundamentally divided, small capitalists
against large, one industry against the other, and even one
establishment against another in the same industry, it was impossible
for the capitalists to secure any united control over the government.
The lack of organization, the presence of competition at every point,
made it impossible that they should agree upon anything but a negative
political policy.

But now that business is gradually becoming politically as well as
economically unified, government ownership and the other projects of
"State Socialism" are no longer opposed on the ground that they must
necessarily prove unprofitable to capital. If their introduction is
delayed, it is at the bottom because they will require an enormous
investment, and other employments of capital are still more immediately
profitable. Machinery, land, and other material factors still demand
enormous outlays and give _immediate_ returns, while investments in
reforestation or in the improvement of laborers, for example, only bring
their maximum returns after a full generation. But the semi-monopolistic
capitalism of to-day is far richer than was its competitive predecessor.
It can now afford to date a part of its expected returns many years
ahead. Already railroads have done this in building some of their
extensions. Nations have often done it, as in building a Panama Canal.
And as capitalism becomes further organized and gives more attention to
government, and the State takes up such functions as the capitalists
direct, they will double and multiply many fold their long-term
governmental investments--in the form of expenditures for industrial
activities and social reforms.

Already leading capitalists in this country as well as elsewhere welcome
the extension of government into the business field. The control of the
railroads by a special court over which the railroads have a large
influence proves to be just what the railroads have wanted, while there
is a growing belief among them, to which their directors and officers
occasionally give expression, that the day may come, perhaps with the
competition of the Panama Canal, when it will be profitable to sell out
to the government--at a good, round figure, of course, such as was
recently paid for railroads in France and Italy. Similarly the new
wireless systems are leading to a capitalistic demand for government
purchase of the old teleg